This morning I was writing a short message to someone, and I had at one point, to make a choice between giving the sentence a striking effect, but one which could be somewhat offputting to the receiver, who could feel emotionally unsatisfied by it, and giving it a warmer touch, though losing the aesthetic impact. I chose the beautiful formula, and it did not go down too well with the receiver.
It is the curse of Enoch Powell, who in his famous speech on immigration, said that he saw "rivers of blood" if immigration continued unabated. He was referring to a passage in , I think, the Aenid, where a seer has a vision of a river turning to the colour of blood, as a presage of disaster. Powell, a haughty, brillant man, felt that his audience would understand his allusion, and if they didn’t , well they’d better get themselves an education . Of course, his audience preferred to straight away understand that he meant the rivers would be awash with the blood of civil war. He was termed an extremist and his political career went crashing down.
When you are in love with language, you could forget that apart from its intrinsic beauty it is a tool to talk to people, and the context can ask for platitudes, even outright lying. Even in the most perilous situations, say as a maitre de cérémonies at an occasion crammed with pompous fools, you utter your formulas ( "Thank you for your kind words. You have perfectly well expressed the feelings of all of us here tonight") with such a face and an undertone of irony that you kill the effect and send sniggers across the room. You have sold your soul to the language and you risk a life of solitude in a hut in the woods, amid yellow parchments, trying to transmute plain English into gold.
I am a latecomer to English, it still has the feeling of a foreign language to me and my vocabulary is limited – I keep a dictionary at hand. This morning I checked "tassel" and "brocade". My first love was French. One reason I loved that language was that as a child I used to watch the Reunion island television channel ( Reunion is the island next to ours, and it is a French département), primarily for the Japanese and American cartoons ( dubbed in French). Talk about a complicated world. At some point I picked up, in a box, a mouldy French history primer, which had been my mother’s back in the late 1940’s. On the cover was a pattern of field flowers, acorns and berries, and it said " Sur cette couverture tu vois les fruits et fleurs de la France. La France est ton pays, tu dois l’aimer de tout ton coeur" ( " On this cover you see the fruits and flowers of France. France is your country. You must love it with all your heart"). We were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in what had been a British colony from 1810 to 1968 ( it was a French colony before that). My family was of Indian origin like most of the population. I still remember what I read ( to be recited in your best sonorous voice):
"Alors Clothilde, qui était chrétienne, épousa Clovis, roi des Francs, qui était paien.
Alors Clovis s’en alla guerroyer contre les Alamands, sur le bord du Rhin, mais la bataille était fort rude
Alors Clovis leva les yeux vers le ciel, et s’écria: "Dieu de Clothilde, si tu me donnes cette victoire, je me fais chrétien"
Alors Dieu donna la victoire à la FRANCE"
( Then Clothilde , who was Christian, wed Clovis, king of the Franks, who was a pagan. The Clovis went to war against the Alamanic tribes, on the banks of the Rhine river, but the issue was uncertain. Then Clovis raised his eyes to the sky and shouted: "God of Clothilde, if you grant me victory, I shall make myself a Christian. Then God granted victory to France")
I also remember reading about Attila and Vercingetorix in that primer, which made me sneeze from its dust. Sometimes a silverfish wriggled away urgently, when one turned a page. On the television, they were showing Dallas. In my heart I rooted in for France. I was a bomb at Hindi, at school ( it was taught, but a pass mark was not obligatory to receive a Certificate of Primary Education), though I did learn the alphabet. The teacher laughed at me and said I was a Creole, the other big group in Mauritius. I did not like Bollywood movies, with the crying and dancing, and badly done fight scenes. It was a very televisual patriotism. I liked France, in part because French movies were better than Indian ones, and what I called French movies included Star Wars and Rambo ( dubbed in French in the local cinemas). For example when they showed the Star Trek series, but in the original American English, I watched it but with a feeling of painful struggle- I did not understand the accent, but then I have a difficulty understanding most accents in English, except BBC English. I watched it to look at Mr Spock’s ears, and in the hope of spectacular spaceship fights. But Star Trek was an altogether more cerebral affair than Star Wars and was lost on a kid of my age.
I also liked France because of the childrens’ books , which included Noddy , and the Famous Five ( all in the French versions). It is only recently that I realised that both were famous British children’s literature. It was then that I realised that the policeman in Toytown was a Bobby. I was dismayed, in part because, sometimes, I still have a slight feeling of apprehension when faced with things British. It has to do with the English movies they showed on television, and which my parents insisted I watch to improve my English. It was television versions of Victorian classics, surely very good ( donations from the British Council, probably) but which , to my eyes, featured extremely cold and pale people, clothed in black, in dark wood panelled rooms, and speaking in a tone of perpetual offense. The children looked like miniature adults, which was what children were supposed to look like, in those days.
I also remember picking up "Great Expectations" from a bookshelf when I was about nine. In a black and white illustration, next to the first page, was a drawing of a huge ugly man, strangling a boy, in a cemetery. The first paragraphs of the story said that the boy was named Pip, and that he had been set upon by a runaway prisoner, while passing by a cemetery. "Bring me food tonight" said the prisoner, " or else I shall come to your house, I shall eat your heart, I shall eat your liver".
In the middle of all this dread, I had also managed to understand, from watching French television programmes, that in the eyes of the French, the British were a sort of ironclad people, a race of men dwelling in a wet grey island, living on cold meat and hot water, unbeatable at war, however much one may have the advantage, at the last minute some dogged and implacable energy set into motion in their hearts, by which they eventually won the day. I also picked up the silly notion that British girls had horsy faces and wore dreadful clothes, and was surprised by their loveliness during my only, and short visit to England, a few years ago.
How come I am writing this blog in English then ? I came to love French partly because of Japanese cartoons, and Rambo and Star Wars. I switched to English, a few years ago, partly because I married a Chinese girl. Such is the world we live in. But there were also an undercurrent of interest for English. In the middle of adolescence ( a period, for me, more blurred than childhood, maybe because of its transitions and embarassments) I remember learning by heart poems by Keats and Byron, though it was in Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Proust and Flaubert that the greater part of my affections lay. Still, oddly, it is images from books in English that I remember vividly, as giving me a feeling of the beauty and vigour of the world outside my house, and of wanting to write about it. I remember the beads of sweat on the chest of the black fisherman, coming from a day’s work at the end of "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" by Mario Vargas Llossa ( a translation from the Spanish) , and Saleem listening to Tai the one toothed boatman’s fantastic stories, with their narrow Kashmiri boat slowly drawing a big "V" on Dal Lake, in the beginning of "Midnight’s Children" by Salman Rushdie. French literature is grand, but a brown man like me could not help being fascinated by Saleem’s adventures, or by those of the guide, the painter of signs and the talkative man in R.K. Narayan’s novels, and how not to fall at Ms Zadie Smith’s feet ? She is a dream, I have read "On Beauty" at one great gulp, barely stopping to drink water. "White Teeth" is my world, even if I don’t live in London.
English literature – the little I know of it – strikes me with an impression of swarming life, there is so much of it. Just American literature is already a colossus by itself. I remember noticing, when I watched "Apostrophes", the French television literary magazine, how, almost ritually, at one point, one of the ( French) writers had to pay hommage to William Faulkner. I also remember Bernard Pivot launching in a dithyrambic introduction of John Updike, his guest one evening, who went all red at the ears ( I did not know, at the time, who he was).
Then there is India, which keeps beaming out good writers ( in the last few years it was Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and others. Now Anita Desai’s daughter has won the Booker. And Pankaj Mishra looks promising).
And then there is what I am embarassed to call the "rest", because it is so inappropriate, but for want of a better term: Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, which punches way above its weight, Nigeria, Kenya and the rest of Anglophone Africa. And still there’s unplacable writers, like Kazuo Ishiguro.
But a slight problem remains : Mauritius is a French speaking island. English, though the official language, feels like a foreign language here. Also, I sometimes feel the swell of French in me, that extraordinary lyricism of Malraux, whom I read at 16 , an activity which should be forbidden for people below 30. He hits you in the brain like drinking absinth. " Car c’est en Inde que se sont le plus déployées les ailes nocturnes de l’humanité…", don’t ask me to translate that, I am unworthy. Or I see the steeple of the church of Cambray, in Du Coté de chez Swann.
But I guess I’ll have to make do with that. I am happy talking Creole and French in Mauritius, and learning Chinese, slowly, word by word, and reading and writing English, who is like a new girlfriend to me, or like a girl one whom one has married out of reason, though one does like her a lot.